Forty Messages I Did Not Reply To

She read the whole thing twice, and then she put the phone face down on the arm of the chair, and it was ten past eleven.

Somebody had shared a screenshot. Something churchy, badly designed, easy to laugh at, and it was funny, and then it was forty messages, and about halfway through it stopped being about the screenshot and became a general and comfortable agreement that this whole area of life is a bit embarrassing.

Nine people in that group. All of them her friends. Two of them she would ring at three in the morning if something happened.

She started typing at message nineteen and deleted it. Started again at twenty-eight and deleted that too. She could not find a version that was not either a lecture or a joke at her own expense, and by the time she had worked that out the thread had moved on to somebody's holiday.

So there is no evidence she was there. And the room she is sitting in is very quiet.

That is your chair. That is your ten past eleven. And I want to say something into that, because there is a line about peace that does not depend on a single one of those messages having gone differently.

A peace with nothing to trip on

Psalm 119 is enormous and most of it is about loving what God has said. Near the end there is a short line about what that produces.

Great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them.Psalm 119:165

Nothing shall offend them.

The word behind offend is a stumbling word. It is the picture of a stone in a path that catches your foot and brings you down. It is not about being unable to feel insulted. It is about there being nothing left in the path with the power to trip you.

And the peace is great, which is to say roomy, more than the situation requires, with margin in it.

You have peace with margin in it tonight. Not a peace that needed the thread to be different. The written word attaches it to loving what God has said rather than to what nine people said after ten o'clock, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman sitting in a very quiet room with her phone face down.

Now let me say something about those nine, because an hour of this can quietly turn a group chat into a tribunal.

They were not voting on you. They were laughing at a badly designed graphic and then drifting, the way a thread drifts, and not one of them composed a single word with you in mind. Two of them would still be in the car within twenty minutes if you rang. That has not changed tonight.

You have no jury in that group. The written word does not make your peace conditional on nine people agreeing with you. The Holy Spirit is fond of every one of them, and there is no side of that thread He is on.

And now the part that is actually keeping you awake, which is not the screenshot.

It is the two deleted messages. It is that you were there for all forty and left no trace, and something in you is calling that cowardice.

It was not cowardice. It was a woman at eleven at night correctly noticing that there was no sentence available which would have helped, and declining to send a worse one. That is judgement, and it is the same judgement you would praise in somebody else.

You are not a coward for staying quiet. Nothing shall offend them does not require you to answer everything that passes in front of you. The Holy Spirit was with you at message nineteen and at message twenty-eight, and He did not want either of those drafts sent.